Neville Brody's Wallpaper* cover. Click on bottom right to see full image. Photograph: Neville Brody/Wallpaper*

Most magazines like their masthead in a nice, strong colour combination – something that will leap off the newsstand. How about white on white? That's the combination chosen by the great design iconoclast Neville Brody in a guest cover for the current issue of Wallpaper* magazine. It's pictured above. In print, the dove-grey bits are clear lacquer over matt white card, and more or less disappear when you look at them head on.

This cover, however, isn't destined for newsagents, where it might make the magazine's readership even more exclusive than usual; it's one of the regular limited-edition treats that they have big names create for their subscribers.

Brody, quite definitely a big name, explains his decision on the masthead as follows: "Firstly, as this is the subscription version, I thought that to re/overstate the name of the magazine was not necessary – the subscriber knows exactly what it is, and certainly shouldn't need to know any of the other details such as prices in other countries, or even in the UK as it is paid for under a different subscription price structure.

"The name already appears on the spine if anyone is still confused. We do tend to inform these days to the point of overkill. Pure marketing paranoia.

"Secondly, as an invited 'artist' I felt that the basis should be a blank canvas. The inside already states Wallpaper, so there shouldn't be a further need to respond to the masthead on the front cover.

"The third reason was one of attempting to match the message within the artwork I was working on by reducing clutter, making the point about the need for a quieter and less visually/textually polluted experience in our approach to communications."

That artwork – a striking collage-like design in an inverted blue heart; click the picture above to see the full cover – presents those subscribers with another challenge. The image is, among other things, a rebus – one of those puzzles in which a series of pictures decode as words. I had to appeal to the magazine's art editor, Sarah Douglas, for the solution, which turns out to be a distinctly un-Wallpaper* phrase: "I hate design."

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About this article

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 07.12 EDT on Wednesday 15 July 2009.
It was last modified at 09.21 EDT on Wednesday 11 June 2014.
It was first published at 07.10 EDT on Wednesday 15 July 2009.